Official Herman Melville Fangirl Thread

>>9704617
>Fell for the Moby Dick meme.

Tits or GTFO

>>9704617
I wish I could resurrect him and show him how beloved Moby-Dick became.

>>9704626
Don't ever speak to women like that ever again or else.

>>9704626
>implying I've read only Moby Meme

Reposting this from the last thread

James Wood on Melville & Moby-Dick:

“When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. All long to possess so many words that using them is a fat charity. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own—this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate paupers of style—Hemingway, Pavese, late Beckett—have secret longings for riches, and strive to make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it: Pavese translated Moby-Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers; yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?”

“In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems. Language is pressed and consoled in that book with Shakespearean agility. No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words in which Melville lived; they were suburbanites by comparison. No other novelist of that age could swim in the poetry of “the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days ... .” And so, despite the usual biographical lamentations, despite our knowledge that Moby-Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States, that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies, that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector—despite all this, one says lucky Melville, not poor Melville. For, in writing Moby-Dick, he wrote the novel that is every novelist’s dream of freedom. It is as if he painted a patch of sky for the imprisoned.”

>>9704617
>women reading lit

When will this meme end?

>>9704626
>>9704667
I thought OP was being ironic or effecting some camaraderie with the lads using the old "listen up, ladies" etc. like how
>>9704631
is clearly being jocular.

>>9705205
Clearly

>>9704617
Herman Melville? You mean bearded Paul McCartney, sir?